Hi Steve,

the meanings of left and right were always very problematic. In my personal
political past right was synonymous with nationalistic, conservative,
(materialistically) focused on self-interest and coercion whereas left stood
for non-nationalistic, grass-roots oriented, altruistic attitudes. I know
that this is my personal experience of the terms and it clearly tells you
were I would like to put myself. Obviously you have a very different concept
of left and right and I don't think that we are getting anywhere with these
terms.

>From the article:
Of course, the media are free to define terms
                  however they like, but the fact is that the
                  ideological origins of Nazism are with the left.
                  The term Nazi itself is short for the National
                  Socialist German Workers Party. Nazism was
                  fashioned as a totalitarian nationalist alternative
                  to the totalitarian international socialism of the
                  Lenin model. But national or international, the
                  relevant word is socialist, which should be the
                  first tip-off to Nazism's leftist origins.


Steve:
Actually, I think that the parallels between Communists, Nazis and
Socialism are stronger than you think.  The Nazis were National
Socialists.  They played a very active role in managing the economy and
planning production.

Volker:
As I wrote, my definition of left is very different from what Llewellyn H.
Rockwell Jr. tries to suggest here. It is interesting to note that he first
argues that the term right doesn't have a clear meaning anymore but then
goes ahead and states that Nazis have their roots in the left (which
logically has to be just as unclear as right). Obviously, he considers
himself rather right-winged and argues against the validity of that label
and the connotations but doesn't have a problem with labelling the others
(left-wing) and throwing them in one pot with the Nazis. There are clear
double standards here.

The whole theory that Nazis were basically socialists is the most absurd
thing I have heard about them since the denial of the holocost. I
unfortunalety mostly have German sources but being German you can be sure
that I went through this topic thouroughly several times in my life.
To conclude from a name of an organisation to its goals is spurious. To
conclude from the term Socialist in the National Socialst that Nazi were
basically socialists is ridiculous. Nazi ideology was actually quite vague
and diverse except for a few points: achievment of absolute power, the
eradication of the jews, and the nationalistic expansion of Germany's
territorry. The used any kind of means to reach these goals with a special
preference for violent means. The socialst elements you mentioned were NOT
part of the Nazi ideology, they were merely means to an end: the Nazis
needed popular support to reach their goals. After world war I and the
economic crisis of the 20's full employment and other measures aimed at the
improvment of the situation of workers and peasants were very popular.
Furthermore, the Nazis needed central planning of the economy to get
prepared for war. There goal was not a centrally planned socialist economy,
they simply used some elements of a certain kind of socialism to pursue
their goals.

With this background the analogy between environmentalists and Nazis becomes
completely irrational and far-fetched (as anyone with minimal knowledge
about both could have sensed from the start and probably the reason why
emotions flew so high on the list - your claim gave me a couple of bad
nights as well).

Just becaused they used some elements of environmentalism and socialism
without sharing the same major goals doesn't mean anything. That is about as
far-fetched as concluding that your ideology must be pretty close to
Hitler's ideology because you both breath(ed).

>From the article:

The plot, however crude, isn't entirely
                  unfamiliar. It is just a version of the nightmarish
                  dream of every variety of socialism:
                  millennialist imaginings of a new age of history,
                  hatred of businessmen, opposition to
                  established religion, a belief in central planning,
                  a love of central power, and a world
                  government that crushes all opposition to the
                  revolution.

What a sweeping polemic generalisation. Nothing I'm looking for in a well
argued article.

                  No matter what they call themselves, the people
                  who have similar dreams of total social and
                  economic control today are on the left, not the
                  right. (That there exists a venerable non-socialist
                  tradition on the left is another issue for another
                  day.) The uncomfortable truth is this: the
                  differences between the fevered imaginings of
                  Furrow, and those advanced in the academic
                  socialist literature, do not concern ideological
                  substance, but its particular shading and
                  application.

Here he picks up his left-right thing again without offering any definition
or utility of this dichotomy. All he tries to do is to contrive some
unfounded generalisation of the left (or the others, not him) and to
demonise it.
There are always different approaches in ideological discussions -
theoretical and real life ones. The neo-liberal free market ideology based
on ultimate individual rights might in theory be quite remote from Naziism.
In real life however, this idelogy leads to effects quite contrary to its
claims and fairly similar to a totalitarian system. A democracy and free
market ideologies are based on the premise of informed individuals and a
leveled playing field. However, as we can easily observe in real life, media
are owned and controlled quite closely by few corporations (except maybe for
the internet). Only a small minority has the cash to make their voice heard
widely and even if you have the cash the big corporations might just refuse
to sell you airtime if you don't have to say what they want to hear (e.g.,
http://adbusters.org/uncommercials/ follow the links under the pictures).
The commercial propaganda mashine is quite similar to Hitler's propaganda
mashine (which was efficient enough to fool you into the believe that the
Nazi's goals were socialst and not nationalist egoist).
And here comes the connection to EE: solving environmental problems through
free market principles is fine for those people who have capital and private
property. How about the poor people? How will they bargain with a factory
about air polution? How will they get air-time, lobby polititians with large
campaign contributions and log onto the internet? How will they bargain for
a decent salary if they don't even have enough money to eat properly? How
will the pay for GMO seeds, fertiliser and pesticides, to nurish themselves?
Didn't we already go through this free market experiment in Victorian
England with all the associated social and environmental costs? Why do we
have to repeat history?

Volker




--- Volker Bahn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm glad you posted this, Jim, because I meant to reply to an older post
> of yours in which you also made a connection between elevating the
> common good over individual rights to fascism (sorry I don't have the
> post handy but if you insist, I'll dig it out).
>
> Oh here it is:
>   Jim:
>   It's a fine line--I'm not saying this distinction is always easily
> made or
>   clear cut by any means.  But the authoritarian tendencies in
>   environmentalism are very real.  Environmentalism is perhaps the most
>   conservative of political ideologies, make no mistake about that.  Any
> time
>   there is talk of elevating the needs of the community over the rights
> of
>   individual inhabitants, human or nonhuman, then there is a subsequent
> risk
>   of "fascism," broadly construed.  It is simply in the nature of the
>   environmental beast.
>
>
>
>   Okay, to be more accurate, the term I should have chosen is
> "collectivism" or possibly even "socialism." Remember, I'm still just
> trying to understand Rand's views--not defend them.
>
> I will criticise the following statements, but because they are not your
> opinions I guess the criticism goes to Rand. However, you were defending
> her against attacks from left, right and center and I'm curious to see
> whether you also conclude my criticism to be unsubstantiated or a
> misinterpretation.
>
>
>
>   To her, socialism is what led (historically) to Nazism and to Soviet
> communism. Socialist intellectuals, then, are the thinkers who let the
> world down, so to speak. Rand:
>
> This is wrong. Nazism and fascism were anti-communist and
> anti-socialist.
>
>   the connection to Naziism and communism :
>   --"It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or
> the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began
> the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute
> state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason
> who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.
>
> Wrong again. Fascism in Italy and later in many European countries was
> initiated and supported by the middle-classes (craftsmen, merchants,
> farmers, employees, officials), who felt threatened in their status and
> wealth by progressing industrialisation and worker's organisation.
>
>   --"Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and
> directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafés, basement beer joints
> and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the
> Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce
> ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government,
> and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who
> would gain control of the government's machinery.
>
> That's partly right. However, the fascists never planned to violently
> elevate society's rights over individual rights. They wanted to elevate
> their own egoistical (and therefore Randian) rights over individual and
> societal rights.
>
>   They extolled the State as the 'Form of the Good,' with man as its
> abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist
> state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases,
> the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal
> essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no
> right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not
> belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his
> existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him
> in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own
> tribal, collective good.
>
>   --"It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist, anti-conceptual
> mentality--which grants no validity to abstractions, no meaning to
> principles and no power to ideas--that can still wonder why a
> theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice to the torrent
> of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist societies as Nazi
> Germany and Soviet Russia.
>
>   Nazi Germany was NOT anywhere close to a socialist society. This is
> historical ignorance.
>
>   Only the Attila-ist mentality can still claim that nobody can prove
> that these had to be the necessary results--or still try to blame it on
> the 'imperfection' of human nature or on the evil of some specific gang
> who 'betrayed and ideal,' and still promise that its own gang would do
> it better and make it work--or still mumble in a quavering voice that
> the motive was love of humanity.
>   --"The pretenses have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer;
> the intellectuals are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to
> evade its cause and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man's
> metaphysically predestined impotence" (The N.I., 48-9).
>
> She seems to have fallen for the propaganda of the Nazis. Fascism and
> Soviet communism were built on propaganda, which of course did not
> represent reality. If her analysis doesn't go any deeper than taking the
> propaganda of totalitarian systems for their real intentions and thus
> tries to discredit social intentions I have to say that I'm starting to
> GAG.
>
> In the same line of logic one could claim that democracy equals
> terrorism because the financing and military support of the Contras in
> Nicaragua was big scale terrorism in the name of democracy.
>
> Sorry, I'm drifting away from EE, but I didn't start it.
>
> Cheers
>
> Volker
>


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